Thursday, October 31, 2013

His was the most beautiful corpse I
had ever seen. It seemed that the flush
had not left the cheeks, and that the mouth was curved in the semblance of a
smile. There was no expression of
sadness or of horror upon the face but, rather, one of sublime resignation. The body itself was muscular and firmly knit;
the phthisis had removed any trace of superfluous fat, and the chest, abdomen
and thighs were perfectly formed. The
legs were fine and muscular, the arms most elegantly proportioned. The hair was full and thick, curling at the
back and sides, and I noticed that there was a small scar above the left
eyebrow. That was the only defect I
could find.

Well,
there’s a dainty dish for Halloween
day, served up by novelist Peter Ackroyd
(born 1949). Ackroyd is one of our most
celebrated novelists and essayists. His
gathered criticism, The Collection:
Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories, Lectures (2001), reflects a
lively and opinionated intelligence; these little gems are among the finest
things he’s written.

Ackroyd’s
biographies are justly famous, and his monumental Dickens (1990) may be the last word on the subject. Written in the manner of a Victorian novel,
Dickens demonstrates the importance of form matched to content. He has also produced excellent biographies of
Turner (2005), Blake (1995) and Thomas More
(1998).

Most of
his novels are equally distinguished, especially to this reader The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
(1983) and our subject today, The
Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008).
Readers expecting the usual hugger-mugger of less accomplished
supernatural novelists, turn elsewhere. But … if you are interested in a novel of
ideas that is equal parts chiller and historical novel, then this book is for
you.

The
Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is a wonderful mix of fact and fancy. Ackroyd’s conceit is that Victor Frankenstein
himself was a friend of Percy and Mary
Shelley, and was there for that storm-driven evening in Switzerland when
the Shelleys, Lord Byron and Dr. John Polidori sat around, telling
ghost stories. That evening led Mary,
then 18 years old, to later write the novel Frankenstein (1818).

The novel
includes a great deal of actual historical incident (Shelley sent down from
school, the drowning death of his first wife, Byron’s friendship with Polidori),
while skillfully inserting into it the story of Frankenstein and his
monster. But, more than anything, what
Ackroyd is playing with is the Romantic novel of ideas, and the notion that
Olympian notions of transcendence and heightened sensibility can be very
dangerous things. Frankenstein – himself
neither poet nor artist and, perhaps, an indifferent scientist – dreams of
lofty achievement and elevated sensations.
Does that drive him to commit horrible acts … or, worse yet, to create
life in a mad ambition to usurp the powers of God, and then refuse
responsibility for the life he has created?

More importantly,
does Frankenstein’s Monster truly exist, or is it an extension of his own
fears, evil ambitions, or, perhaps, a suppressed homosexual desire for Percy
Shelley?

Like Dracula, the “meaning” of the
Frankenstein Monster has altered with each decade since first created by Mary
Shelley – the book can be interpreted as everything from a female-free
reproductive paradigm to a socialist tract.
If succeeding generations have grappled with the overarching meaning of
the Monster, why should Victor Frankenstein himself be exempt?

Ackroy’ds
Monster – like that of Mary Shelley – is no mute, shambling zombie, but,
rather, an articulate and vengeful revenant.
He did not ask to be brought into this world and, cannot understand
human cruelty and apathy. Eventually, like
Milton’s Satan, he believes that it is perhaps better to do evil than to do
nothing at all. That, perhaps more than
anything else, is the true meaning of Halloween.

Here’s
another snippet, where the Monster confronts Frankenstein after murdering
Shelley’s first wife, Harriet:

“I wished you to notice me.”

“What?”

“I wished you to think of me. To consider my plight.”

“By killing Harriet?”

“I knew then that you would not be
able to throw me off. To disdain me.”

“Have you no conscience?”

“I have heard the word.” He smiled, or what I took to be a smile
passed across his face. “I have heard
many words for which I do not feel the sentiment here.” He tapped his breast. “But you understand that, do you not, sir?”

“Oh, surely you have some
inkling? I am hardly unknown to
you.” I realized then that that his was
the voice of youth – of the youth he had once been – and that a cause of horror
lay in the disparity between the mellifluous expression and the distorted
appearance of the creature. “You have
not lost your memory, I trust?”

“I wish to God I had.”

“God? That is another word I have heard. Are you my
God?”

I must have given an expression of
disdain, or disgust, because he gave out a howl of anguish in a manner very
different from the way he had conversed.
With one sudden movement he picked up the great oaken table, lying
damaged upon the floor, and set it upright.
“You will remember this. This was
my cradle, was it not? Here was I
rocked. Or will you pretend that the
river gave me birth?” He took a step
towards me. “You were the first thing
that I saw upon this earth. Is it any
wonder that your form is more real to me than that of any other living
creature?”

I turned away, in disgust at myself
for having created this being. But he
misunderstood my movement. He sprang in
front of me, with a celerity unparalleled.
“You cannot leave me. You cannot
shut out my words, however distasteful they may be to you. Were you covered by oceans, or buried in
mountains, you would still hear me.”

We hear
him still, nearly 200 years after his conception. Frankenstein’s Monster is that which in each
of us is both abject and terrible.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

It’s not
often the Shakespeare’s Globe
productions make it to the US, so when they arrive it is cause for riotous
celebration. So … it is with a great
deal of disappointment that I report that the recent production of
Shakespeare’s Richard III at the
Belasco Theatre starring Mark Rylance
(born 1960) is an ill-conceived, ramshackle conception. This is a great shame as Rylance is one of
the most gifted actors of his generation – however, I doubt I have ever seen a
more wrong-headed interpretation of Shakespeare’s crookbacked anti-hero.

Problems
with Richard III start at the top and the rot continues down. As written, Richard is a charming
monster. He revels in his villainy, and
his constant asides to the audience make us complicit in his monstrosity. His ego is enormous and his self-satisfaction
over the most wretched and heinous crimes become droll in his endless
self-regard and delight in manipulation.
In short, it is a role for an actor with a High Comic sensibility.

Sadly,
High Comedy is not in Rylance’s bag of tricks.
He is an expert Low Comedian, and while he does get laughs with Richard,
the overall conception never comes alive.
Imagine Peter Sellers’ Inspector
Clouseau disguised as Richard III, and you get the idea. There is a great deal of business between
Rylance and the audience in the first few rows, where he is mugging for a
response, while some of his most malefic lines are thrown away as
under-the-breath asides. This is not
High Comic villainy, it’s a homicidal Nigel
Bruce. It is a novel approach, but
that is all.

Richard
III is presented in repertory with Twelfth
Night, and in strives to recreate an Elizabethan theatrical
experience. True to the time, all
women’s roles are played by men. I have
seen this work wonderfully well in the past (I recall the troupe Cheek By Jowl in a series of
Shakespearean productions at BAM 20 years ago that were stunning), but the
effect here is more Monty Python
than Renaissance theater. Joseph Timms, as Lady Anne, is so
heavily made up that he seems more like a waxwork figure. (White pancake makeup applied with a trowel,
one would assume, to ape portraits of Elizabeth.) Sad to say that equally dire
is Samuel Barnett, as Queen
Elizabeth, who unfortunately resembles Timms in makeup to such a degree that
it’s almost impossible to tell one from the other.

Richard
the III is really Richard’s play, and there aren’t many other good roles;
however, what is here is poorly played. Angus Wright, as Buckingham, looks and
sounds like Raymond Massey … and is
just as bad an actor. But perhaps the
most egregious offender of the evening is Kurt
Egyiawan as the Duchess of York, and later as Richmond -- in a lifetime of
watching Shakespeare on stage, I have never seen a more wretched performance. Only Liam
Brennan, as Clarence, seems to make something of his part. I hope to see more of him in the future.

Tim Carroll directs and makes rather a hash of
it. The staging is unimaginative and, at
times, simply ridiculous. Troubled by
dreams of his victims, Carroll parades them backstage in white sheets holding
candles; more Our Gang than
Halloween horror. How such a gruesome
play was rendered so bloodless may be the great mystery of this
production. It ends with Richard and
Richmond locked in mortal combat – but it never convinces. Nor does it help that – in an attempt to
create a true Elizabethan experience – the entire cast gather onstage at
curtain’s fall and pad through a clumsy quadrille.

We are
seeing Twelfth Night later this week; it is Stephen Fry’s Broadway debut, and perhaps his intelligence, taste
and sense of fun will positively impact on the production. We can but hope.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Last
week we told you about People’s Symphony
Concerts – which have been in existence since 1900, when they were founded
by conductor Franz Arens. World class musicians – both emerging talents
and old masters – have been the mainstay of People’s Symphony, and each and
every year the lineup grows more impressive.

So, I
was greatly excited when an amateur musician friend told me of a concert he heard
in San Francisco where Garrick Ohlsson
(born 1948) played. That same concert
was in the offering at People’s Symphony and the early verdict was … it was not
to be missed.

Nor did
Ohlsson disappoint. The concert at
Washington Irving in Gramercy Park last Saturday evening was simply
splendid. Dressed in impeccable tie and
tails, Ohlsson is showman enough to command the stage in any venue, and once he
sat behind the Steinway piano, he held the audience spellbound for more than
two hours.

Ohlsson
opened with the very familiar Two
Rhapsodies, Op. 79 (1879) by Johannes
Brahms (1833-1897). This warhorse is
a mainstay of classical music stations, and one would expect its allure to dim
with over-familiarity. Not so under
Ohlsson’s skillful playing; it was fresh and alive and the line of Brahms’
music clean and clear.

Ohlsson
followed with Fantasia on Ad Nos, ad
salutarem undam, S. 259 (1850) by Franz
Liszt (1811-1886), easily my favorite piece of the evening. This is Liszt at his most ornate and
outlandish, and Ohlsson played the
Adagio with tremendous gusto and the Fuga
with deep sensitivity. If you are not an
aficionado of Liszt or his music, this piece may well change your mind. It demands quite technical virtuosity, and
Ohlsson plays it with brio.

The
program continued with Selection from
Etude for Piano (1915) by Claude
Debussy (1862-1918), which I found amusing, but undemanding. Debussy has never been wholly to our taste,
but the Pour les sixtes was quite
wonderful and almost enough to make me reconsider my opinion on this polarizing
composer.

Ohlsson
ended with Fantasy in F minor, Op. 49
(1841), by Frederic Chopin
(1810-1849). It is a work of deep,
emotional tenderness, and it was beautifully rendered by the pianist.

Garrick
Ohlsson has a worldwide reputation for his Olympian interpretive and technical
prowess. He was born in White Plains,
NY, and began his piano studies at age 8.
He has won too many awards to be fully chronicled here, but they include
the Chopin Competition in Warsaw and
the Avery Fisher Prize. His 2013-14 season will include recitals in
Montreal, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angles, Seattle and Kansas City,
culminating in February at Carnegie Hall. In January, with the Boston Symphony, he will
present the world premier of a concerto commissioned for him from Justin Dello Joio; he will also play,
this year, works by Beethoven, Schubert and Charles Tomlinson Griffes.
If you have even the remotest interest in virtuoso piano playing, be
sure to see out Garrick Ohlsson this year.

One
parting word about People’s Symphony.
There are still some tickets let for their three, concurrent series, but
numbers are limited. It remains the best
deal for New Yorkers passionate about music that I have ever come across, and
subscriptions will not be regretted. The
can be found at: http://pscny.org/.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Today we
look at the most beloved of the Marx Brothers, Harpo Marx. We must also pause
for an unpleasant confession: when we here at The Jade Sphinx first became enamored of the Marx Brothers, we not
only disliked Harpo, we loathed him.

Strong
words, we know, but let us explain. While
growing up, comedy was for me a verbal exercise – a concentration of wit and
wordplay. Comedy came down to the
written word and its skillful delivery. Comedy
was something said. Slapstick, pantomime
and clowning did not possess the elements of wit and intelligence, to our
minds, and were simply degraded … funniness.

Fortunately,
with age comes wisdom (or a distant relative of it, in my case), and now Harpo
is perhaps my favorite of the team. Not
simply because I have been able to overcome my linguistic prejudices and finally
recognize his comic genius, but, more importantly, because I see the real and
elemental sweetness of the man shining through his work.

Of all
of the Brothers Marx, Harpo had much the happiest life. Groucho said Harpo had a talent for happiness, and that comes through in everything he does.

Harpo
was born Adolph Marx in 1888. He supplemented
the family income with piano and harp playing, and joined the act as a
comic. Though he originally spoke in his
onstage appearances, reviewers were quick to praise his skills as a pantomime
and physical comic. Knowing a strength
when it was pointed out to him, he became a mute act and comedy history was
made.

If the
Marx Brothers movies are studies in surrealism, then Harpo is the most surreal
of them all. It is no surprise that he
was loved by Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
and other absurdists. Like a character
from a Looney Tunes cartoon, the
rules of time, space and dimension that rule all of us do not seem to apply to
Harpo. He is able to pull lit
cigarettes, candles or steaming cups of coffee from the pockets of his pendulous
jacket. Dogs lean out of tattoos and
bark at the audience; he can make a payphone payoff a jackpot. He is virtually indestructible, and though he
can be hurt, it seems as if his corporeal self is made of stronger stuff than
are we.

But for
all of the invincibility – he is the only Marx Brother who is vulnerable. Harpo is capable of great acts of kindness,
self-sacrifice and sweetness that are impossible to the more self-absorbed
Groucho and Chico. In more ways than one,
Harpo was the soul of the act – the most outlandish of them all was also the
most human.

If Harpo
was undisguised ID, it was the ID of a basically good child. He was ruled by lust, hunger and enthusiasm,
but never self-interest, enmity nor malice.
We may wish for Chico’s wiliness, or Groucho’s Olympian wit, but we long
for Harpo’s soul.

Harpo
married Susan Fleming in 1936. He was
the only one of the performing brothers who married once and married
happily. They adopted four children:
Bill, Alex, Jimmy and Minnie. He is
recorded as having told fellow comedian George Burns: I would like to adopt as many children as I have windows in my
house. So when I leave for work, I want
a kid in every window waving goodbye.

Though Harpo
received very little formal schooling, he was good friends with most of the Algonquin Round Table, including critic
Alexander Woolcott (1887-1943), who
may have had a homosexual passion for the comic. Groucho thought spending time with the Round
Table was “like swimming in a shark pool,” but Harpo seemed to hold his own,
mostly by being such a good audience.
When Woolcott was parodied in the 1939 comedy The Man Who Came Dinner, by George
S. Kaufman (1889-1961) and Moss Hart
(1904-1961), Harpo was transformed into the character Banjo, memorably played
by Jimmy Durante (1893-1980) in the
film version. Harpo and Woolcott,
however, both played their fictional selves on the Los Angeles stage – and what
your correspondent wouldn’t have given to have seen that!

Later in
life, Harpo published his autobiography, Harpo
Speaks. And did he ever, at long
last. His final public appearance was in
1964, when he appeared onstage with comedian Allan Sherman (1924-1973) to announce his retirement. Once he started talking, it seemed as if he
would never shut up.

Harpo
died just six months later from a heart attack following open heart
surgery. Many people have recorded that
it was the only time they saw brother Groucho cry.

Despite
rumors to the contrary, Harpo was not mute and spoke with an old, New York
accent. If it does not destroy too much
of the illusion, you can hear him here:

Thursday, October 24, 2013

We
continue our look at advanced Marxism with a profile of perhaps the most
underrated Marx Brother, Chico Marx. (For all intents and purposes, we will
consider Zeppo, handsomest of the
Marxes, as interchangeable leading man.)

Chico is
often dismissed as a one-joke character: a zany Italian immigrant accent
waiting for a misunderstanding to happen.
That is only true as far as it goes; Chico’s art was much more subtle
than one would think.

First,
there is the question of Chico’s ethnicity.
Is he represented “as” an Italian, or some mad simulacrum of one? I, for one, am never sure. I am reminded of a scene in Animal Crackers (1930), where Chico
recognizes a fellow conman in disguise:

Ravelli (Chico): How is it you got to be Roscoe W. Chandler?

Chandler: Say, how did you get to be Italian?

Ravelli: Never mind—whose confession is this?

Chico
has often been dismissed as “the third one,” or, more ridiculously, as
Groucho’s straight man. What both
assessments fail to consider is that Chico could be screamingly funny with the
right material. In Duck Soup (1933), Chico is a spy snooping on President Rufus T.
Firefly (Groucho). Here is his report to
the foreign ambassador:

Monday we watch Firefly's house, but
he no come out. He wasn't home. Tuesday we go to the ball game but he fool us:
he no show up. Wednesday he go to the ball game and we fool him. We no show up.
Thursday was a double-header; nobody show up. Friday it rained all day. There
was no ball game, so we stayed home and we listened to it over the radio.

Chico
has his best moment in A Night at the
Opera (1935). There, he, Harpo and
the Zeppo stand-in (Allan Jones) are
disguised as famous aviators who travel to America … by steamship. At the reception welcoming our heroes Chico
recounts:

Friends, how we happen to come to
America is a great story. But I don't tell that... The first time we started,
we get-a halfway across when we run out-a gasoline and we gotta go back. Then I
take-a twice as much gasoline. This time we-a just about to land. Maybe three
feet. When whaddya think? We run out-a gasoline again. And a-back we go again
to get-a more gas. This time I take-a plenty gas. Well, we get-a halfway over
when what-a you think-a happened? We forgot-a the aeroplane. So we gotta sit
down and we talk it over. Then I get a great idea. We no take-a gasoline. We no
take-a the aeroplane. We take a steamship! And that, friends, is how we fly
across the ocean!

However,
it is now time to put down the notion that Chico was Groucho’s straight man
once and for all. Very often the verbal
highlight of a Marx Brothers film is the duologue between Groucho and
Chico. What is amazing about these
verbal fisticuffs is that…. Chico usually wins.

We have
become so accustomed to Groucho being the genuine wit of the group, and that
his verbal dexterity was so powerful that mountains would fall before him, but
simply watching the films demonstrates that Chico almost always gets the better
of Groucho. And that is because Chico
wields his own version of Groucho’s greatest weapon against him: he is
impervious to logic.

These
set pieces often start on a very prosaic level and become increasingly more
surreal and absurd, often because Chico is either taking everything Groucho
says literally, or his own brand of absurdity is more impervious. Here, for example, is Chico guarding a
speakeasy when Groucho comes to the door.
The password to get in is “swordfish,” and Chico lets Groucho have three
guesses:

Baravelli: Who are you?

Wagstaff: I'm fine thanks, who are you?

Baravelli: I'm fine too, but you can't come in unless you give the password.

Wagstaff: Well, what is the password?

Baravelli: Aw, no! You gotta tell me. Hey, I tell what I do. I give you three
guesses. It's the name of a fish.

Wagstaff: Is it Mary?

Baravelli: Ha-ha. That's-a no fish.

Wagstaff: She isn't, well, she drinks like one. Let me see. Is it sturgeon?

Baravelli: Hey you crazy! Sturgeon, he's a doctor cuts you open when-a you
sick. Now I give you one more chance.

Baravelli: You mean chocolate calamel. I like that too, but you no guess it.
Hey, what-sa matter, you no understand English? You can't come in here unless
you say 'swordfish.' Now I'll give you one more guess.

Wagstaff: (to himself: Swordfish. Swordfish) I think I got it. Is it
'swordfish'?

Baravelli: Hah! That's-a it! You guess it!

Wagstaff: Pretty good, eh?

Chico
was the oldest surviving of the Marx children (brother Manfred died in infancy)
and the first to pass away. He was born
Leonard Marx in 1887 in New York. He
was, in many ways, the wild Marx. A
gambler and hustler, he never met a card game or a chorus girl he could
resist. And though he was a chronic
philanderer, his two wives and daughter doted on him.

Though a
disaster as a gambler (eventually his brothers had to take his financial
matters in hand themselves … mainly to keep Chico from being killed over
gambling debts), he was a wonderful manager and schmoozer. He managed the act after mother Minnie Marx died, and his connections
at MGM got the team out of Paramount and over to Metro, where they made two
masterpieces, A Night at the Opera (1935)
and A Day at the Races (1937), under
the auspices of wunderkind Irving
Thalberg (1899-1936). Between films,
Chico toured with a Big Band, The Chico Marx Orchestra, with singer Mel Torme.

The
Brothers Marx seem to run true to form onstage and off. When Chico died in 1961, his funeral was held
in the Wee Kirk O’ the Heather Chapel at Forest Lawn Memorial Park. A rabbi officiated for a Jewish fake Italian
in a replica Scottish chapel. At the
funeral, one of the speakers described Chico in terms unrecognizable to both
friends and family, prompting Harpo to lean over to his surviving brothers and
say, “when I go, do me a favor and hire a mime.”

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Okay, I’ll
admit it – I’m a Marxist. I’ve been a
Marxist for as long as I can remember, dating back to my earliest years of
grade school. And I don’t see it
changing any time soon. I’m a Marxist for
life. (Note to the NSA: this is an old,
venerated American tradition called humor.
Just go with it.)

Hard as
it is to believe now, but at one time it was possible to be young in the US and
have aesthetic and emotional attachments to cultural artifacts of previous
generations. When I grew up in the
1970s, it was just as easy to be a rabid fan of The Marx Brothers or, say, Bela
Lugosi, as it was to appreciate Elton
John or The Beatles. Culture was a more amorphous stew of new and
old, good and bad, the tried-and-true and the newly emerging. Radio dramas from the 1940s could still be
heard in reruns on radio along with Top 40 programs, and late night television was
awash in classic American cinema. It was
a wonderful time to grow up, if one was awake, because the great kaleidoscope
of American culture was spread out before you.

That has
largely changed. Our culture has become
too fragmented, our viewing and listening habits too balkanized, and our deep
and abiding suspicion of anything remotely challenging has shrunken the offerings
of our cultural landscape. It is, I believe,
the sneaking suspicion that something not contemporary may be too challenging
-- too slow, too much story, not loud enough – that has consigned so much of
American culture, both high and pop, to the contemporary dustbin.

Not so
just a few decades ago. And no figures
from the Golden Age of American pop culture loomed larger – in college campuses
or grade school playgrounds – than the comedy team The Marx Brothers. It is
arguable that the Marx Brothers were more popular in the 1970s than they were
in their heyday of the 1930s. It is a
success story that has no real equal in American entertainment, except, of
course, for the continuing popularity of the more proletarian Three Stooges.

During this
reclamation, the aging and increasingly frail Groucho Marx (1890-1977) managed a one-man show at New York’s Carnegie Hall, and appeared on just
about every television venue that would have him. It was a wonderful coda to a remarkable career,
and one that, we hope, made up for many real-life disappointments and setbacks.

Born Julius
Henry Marx in New York, Groucho was pushed into show business by his mother,
Minnie. She was convinced that a family
act would be a hit, and all five brothers would eventually work onstage as a
team or separately.

Chico, the oldest brother, was a
compulsive gambler and womanizer who seemed, oddly enough, to be mother’s
favorite. Things came easily to Chico,
and Groucho resented that. Harpo, who clearly had some kind of
undiagnosed learning disability, was often the subject of Groucho’s most
condescending jokes. However, Harpo was
a genuinely happy man – he had a talent for happiness that Groucho lacked. (Indeed, Groucho was deeply suspicious of happiness.) The two younger brothers, Zeppo and Gummo, never
really embraced show business, but Groucho felt a responsibility towards them,
and often made arrangements to further their careers and businesses.

In fact,
Groucho played father to his brood of brothers, something that their real-life
father Sam could never quite pull off. It
is perhaps this early imposition of responsibility and obligation that soured
Groucho so early in life, and made his private relationships so fraught. He married three times, twice to women young
enough to be his daughter, and spent his sunset years with a conniving
adventuress who sucked away his energy and cash while trying to establish
herself as a Hollywood player.

But,
whatever messiness of his private life, Groucho was probably the most gifted
comedian of the 20th Century.
He had all the gifts: he looked funny, his voice was funny, his walk and
mannerisms were funny; he was a gifted physical comedian and a comedic lord of
language.

Groucho’s
métier was the insult; this has been much degraded of late, but with Groucho it
was an art form. Groucho’s insults
relied on real wit, not merely funniness, which is, in the final analysis, the
ultimate indication of intelligence. We
could easily fill up multiple pages with examples, but here is one delirious scene
from Horse Feathers (1932). Groucho, as Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff,
romances college widow Connie Bailey (Thelma
Todd) in a rowboat while she tries to steal information on the upcoming
college football game:

Wagstaff: This is the first time I've been out in a canoe since I saw The
American Tragedy.

Connie: Oh, you're perfectly safe, Professor, in this boat.

Wagstaff: I don't know. I was going to get a flat bottom but the girl at the
boat house didn't have one.

Connie: Well you know, Professor, I could go on like this, drifting and
dreaming forever. What a day! Spring in the air.

Wagstaff: Who, me? I should spring in the air and fall in the lake?

Connie: Oh, Professor, you're full of whimsy.

Wagstaff: Can you notice it from there? I'm always that way after I eat
radishes.

The
football team's signals fall out of Wagstaff's coat pocket into the water and
drift by Connie. He boasts that he has a second set of signals in his other
pocket: Luckily, I've got a duplicate
set in my pocket. I always carry two of everything. This is the first time I've
only been out with one woman. Then, she attempts to use baby talk on him to
divulge Huxley's football signals:

Connie: Do you know, Professor, I've never seen football signals? Do
you think a little girl like me could understand them?

Wagstaff: I think a little girl like you would understand practically
anything.

Wagstaff: If icky girl keep on tawking that way, big stwong man gonna kick
all her teef wight down her thwoat.

The Marx
Brothers made some 13 films in all; some brilliant (Duck Soup, Monkey Business,
Horse Feathers, A Night at the Opera, A Day
at the Races), some awful (At the
Circus), but all worth seeing, even if for only occasional glimpses of
genius.

In the
1950s, Groucho became a solo act, serving as quiz master for You Bet Your Life on both radio and
television. Here was Groucho in his
element – talking to a broad cross-section of people and deploying his killer
wit. Oddly enough, this was Groucho’s
most celebrated star turn before his great revival in the 1970s, and though
amusing, You Bet Your Life was never as inventive, transgressive or fall-down
funny as his classic films.

If you
have not seen the early Marx Brothers films – particularly the films made at
Paramount: The Coconuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck
Soup – do so without delay. They are
among the most wonderful artifacts of American pop culture.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Just in
time for the holidays, William Joyce
returns with a delightful new picture book.

We here
at The Jade Sphinx do not hide our
admiration for the animator, illustrator, author William Joyce (born 1957) one of the great talents of our age. We think that he is, in many ways, a
modern-day Winsor McCay (1867-1934),
an artist-showman with a distinct genius for entertaining children of all
ages. For some time he has been involved
in the creation of a series of books centered on what he calls The Guardians of Childhood – creating a
cosmology that explains the origins of beloved figures from childhood folklore
from Santa Claus to the Man in the Moon. (And we will review his latest prose novel in
the series, The Sandman and the War of
Dreams.)

His
latest picture book, The Mischievians,
however, is not part of the Guardian series, and is something of a palate
cleanser for those following the series.
It is also completely unlike his earlier picture books, in that it is
not a narrative story but, rather, a playful notebook/encyclopedia on Mischievians
– the little gremlins responsible for missing socks, hanging boogers,
bellybutton lint and a host of other social ills.

The book
was Compiled with illuminations by Dr.
Maximilian Fortisque Robinson Zooper, MD, PdD, LOL, OMD, QED, & Golly
Gee. Done while snapping his fingers in
the air. Just kidding. Mayb
(the final e is stolen by a sneaky Mischievian). So, we know already that we are in the realm
of Joyce at his most raucous and, perhaps, his most naughty.

The book
details questions asked of Zooper by two children eager to know more about the
forces at work that create smells, lose socks and enable embarrassing situations
for us all. And Zooper responds,
outlining the various types of Mischievians with full-color illustrations.

The
illustrations are quite wonderful, some done in Joyce’s customary luminescent Golden
Age of American Illustration style, while many of the paintings of the
Mischievians are completely alien to his other, published work. These drawings, with all of their febrile
energy and boundary-pushing intensity, owe more to Ed “Big Daddy” Roth
(1932-2001), famed hot rod and bubblegum card illustrator. But Joyce’s revamped sense of design is
evident everywhere in the book, from the purposely faded and heavily-used cover
(looking like a much-thumbed schoolbook) to the constant little hands of Mischievians
everywhere, taking the very letters from the page. Once again Joyce demonstrates that book
design (and books themselves) are not static enterprises, but sources of both
fun and motion.

Here’s a
sample of the delights found in The Mischievians:

Question:

Dr. Zooper, you know when you look
in the mirror and see a booger dangling out of your nose and you know it’s been
there maybe all day and everybody has probably seen it? Did a Mischievian do that?

Answer:

Yes!
This mischievous duty is performed by Danglers. A small group of Danglers live in your
nose. Their only job is to lure the
nervous Booger out of the nostril.
(Boogers are notoriously shy.)
Once out, Booger discover that they love to see and be seen. When the Booger is visible, the Danglers
return to their hideout in your nose.
Never by embarrassed by a Booger that is dangling. A dangling Booger is a happy Booger.

Question:

Do I have to leave the Booger
dangling?

Answer:

That’s between you and your Booger.

Here is
William Joyce as you’ve never seen him before.
A hoot from start to finish, The Mischievians is good, old-fashioned
mischievous fun. Recommended for all
children, and for the young at heart.

Friday, October 18, 2013

Proving
once again that they are the country’s premiere museum-without-walls, the Dahesh makes its treasures available to
New Yorkers in one of the most stunning shows I have seen in years.

Housed
in the Museum of Biblical Art, Sacred
Visions: Nineteenth-Century Biblical Art from the Dahesh Museum Collection features
some 30 works from the Dahesh collection, all masterful pictures by leading 19th
Century French academicians. The
exhibition traces the renewed interest in Biblical myths following the
expansion of biblical archeology and the advent of photography, which produced
travel books with pictures of the Holy Land.

As
co-curator Sarah Schaefer of the
Dahesh (with Alia Nour) writes in
her exhibition notes: One very important way that artists
modernized the representation of biblical subjects was by creating what they
considered more historically “authentic” images, stimulated by popular interest
in the Holy Land beginning in the late eighteenth century. As travel and communication to the Middle
East became more feasible and desirable, artists explored Egypt, Jerusalem,
Hebron, and other significant sites in order to produce more “objective”
representations of the Bible. Some
sought to depict biblical monuments in their contemporary form, while others
saw the people of the Holy Land as living relics of a distant past. … For those artists who were unwilling or
unable to visit the Holy Land, there were countless travel accounts, prints,
and eventually photographs that documented the region. It was thus possible to create what the
public considered a “true” image of the biblical past without having actually
seen the sites mentioned.

The
show, which opens today, is has many stunning pieces. Oddly, most of them are not the ‘showcase’
pieces, but, rather, things that are remarkable in-and-of themselves. More important, this exhibition demonstrates
how essential the male nude was to the academic tradition, and how drawing the
figure led to virtuosic, finished work.

Very interesting
is Alexandre Cabanel’s (1823-1889) Death of Moses. But while this picture is quite remarkable,
more interesting still is the drawing hung along side of it, which is a graph
drawing of the finished painting, blocked out in grids for final painting on
the massive canvas. Cabanel actually
changed God’s pose from the test drawing to finished painting, and it is a
fascinating insight into the creative process.

Also beautiful
is Joseph’s Coat Brought Back to Jacob
(1841) by Jules Ambroise Francois Naudin
(1817-1876), which is a masterful painting combining both the historic and
neoclassic strains of art. The figures
are clearly and cleanly depicted, and the emotion telegraphed beautifully, but
it is rather cold in the final analysis.

More captivating
is what might be the most interesting piece in the exhibition, The Last judgment, a drawing by Paul Chenavard (1808-1895). Chenavard was an Enlightenment Era
freethinker, so his feelings for religious paintings must always be
interpreted. This massive drawing, which
must be about 40x80, will happily reward hours of study. In many ways a meditation on Michelangelo’s Judgment Day painting on the wall of
the Sistine Chapel, Chenavard spins
his own take on the Christian cosmos.
Christ is paramount, and, like Michelangelo’s Christ, this is a beardless,
curiously human Jesus. (There is no
halo.) In the lower corner of the picture
is a crowned figure entwined with a giant serpent. Is this Satan? Or the Archangel Michael? The figure is ambiguous and
multi-faceted. While speaking with
co-curator Alia Nour, she told me
that “Chenavard delighted in ambiguity. Being
a humanist, he drew very human figures, and it is left to the educated viewer
to interpret the meanings of his cosmos.”

For this
viewer, however, the most beautiful picture in this exhibition is Abel’s
Offering by Hans Andersen Brendekilde
(1857-1942), dated 1908. This picture
alone is worth going to this stunning show.
In it, Brendekilde depicts Abel leading a long train of sheep along a
sunlit landscape. On the pyre before him
is a sacrifice to God; the sheep watch as he gesticulates towards heaven and
the smoke lifts the remains on a fellow lamb towards the heavens. It is a stunning, pagan note to add to a
Biblical exhibition; though created in the early days of the 20th
Century, it is a wonderfully pagan piece of art. It cuts deep to the heart of a primal
paganism, and the composition perhaps borrows something from the painters of
the American West, Charles Marion
Russell, in particular.

The
exhibition was hung and designed with a sure hand by Dean Ebben. Ebben restored
and re-stretched and re-framed the massive Christ
and the Children (1894) by Franck
Kirchbach (1859-1912), which is a large-scale painting of a type seldom
seen today. It is a wonderful piece of
work and a heroic installation.

Sacred
Visions: Nineteenth-Century Biblical Art from the Dahesh Museum Collection is the first exhibition under
the auspices of the museum’s new Director, Richard
P. Townsend, an accomplished art historian and museum professional. Townsend has previously held curatorial and
leadership positions in the Museum of Latin American Art and Price Tower Arts
Center. If the show is an indication of
his tenure-to-come, The Museum of Biblical Art has chosen wisely and well.

We here
at the Jade Sphinx have had a
special relationship with the Dahesh.
Mainly, this is because we share a similar vision: that the artist is
the creator of beautiful things, and that art is the celebration of
beauty. It is a position out-of-tune with
Modernists and Post-Modernists, but beauty always will win out over time. Be part of the avant garde and return to the past of Academic portraiture.

The
Museum of Biblical Art is at 1865 Broadway at 61st Street, and
admission is free. For more information,
call 212.408.1500.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

For
those who thought we at The Jade Sphinx
had procrastinated by waiting three weeks between posts, what would be the
response when I confess that it took me 40 years to get around to reading this
book?

I well
remember when W.C. Fields By Himself
was first released. I was just 10 years
old and already obsessed with the movie comedians of Hollywood’s Golden Age,
perhaps W.C. Fields (1880-1946) most
of all. Media coverage was
extensive. Ronald J. Fields, grandson of
the great man, had gathered his grandfather’s papers, saying, this book is really the autobiography that
W.C. Fields would have written. I merely
compiled his own letters, writings, and thoughts; wrote the commentary and a
short introduction. I think this should
become the definitive book on W.C. – not padded out with anecdotes and
reminiscences that cry for credibility, but rather, a portrait of W.C. as he
perceived himself, as he actually lived – the true story.

Was the
40-year wait worth it? Well, yes… but
for all the wrong reasons.

First
off, this book is not a biography, nor the first draft of an
autobiography. What Ronald Fields did
was, simply, take his grandfather’s papers and place them in some sort of coherent
order – and even that is not strictly chronological. There is no real effort to weave a
biographical narrative around them, there is no insight or context, and much of
the book seems padded (nay, bloated) with truly incidental correspondence. (Do we really need nearly 15 pages of Fields’
letters to his wife, explaining why he’s sending a $15 check instead of a
$20? Wouldn’t it be better, for example,
to explain their marital difficulties and simply reprint a letter or two?) What Ronald Fields really did was gather what
he had (both the deeply interesting and the merely tedious) and left it to the
dedicated reader to make sense of it.

But,
while this sounds like a deep criticism of the book – it’s not. It is merely disappointment at a presumed
biography/autobiography. If you are
interested in Fields, think he is funny, or want to know how the mind of one of
the last century’s most creative funnymen worked, than this book is a goldmine.

Here is
Fields in all of his contradictions – the sweet man who could be genuinely
nasty, the generous family man who hated charities, the lover of freedom who
liked J. Edgar Hoover. You may not know the coherent story of his
life once reading W.C. Fields By Himself, but you will know the man.

Here,
for example, is Fields writing to studio head Jack Warner once Warner asked for
a contribution to his favorite charity.
Warner thought if Hollywood’s elite did not contribute to his favorite
charity, the country would descend into Communism:

Dear Mr. Warner:

Thanks for your letter of January
29, which, by the way, is my natal day.

I am sorry my notation on your
letter was not more lucid and so cryptic.
I apologize. I know that you are
a busy man and it is fine of you to champion these worthy causes and I, like
yourself, am adverse to Communism. I
never wish to see it rear its ugly head in America. I appreciate and have enjoyed to the fullest
our liberties and our freedom to do as we please, providing we do not break any
of the laws of our country, not to be brow-beaten and threatened as I
understand these unfortunate people are in Russia.

However, I thought your letter of
January 19th had a Communistic lash and I think you were quoted in
one of the trade papers as threatening to expose all those who did not
contribute an amount according to your ideas.
That is still your prerogative – to expose me and ruin me with the
public and drive me out of moving pictures.
I know what I’ll do, I’ll go to India and become a missionary. I hear there’s good money in that too.

I still want to take care of
charities in my own way and personally.
I think this is one of our inalienable rights.

Sincerely,

W.C. Fields

It is
the “I know what I’ll do, I’ll go to India” that really sells it.

Then
there is my favorite letter in the book – to the Christian Science Monitor after they panned his masterpiece, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. Clearly, Fields did not suffer fools gladly:

Dear Editor:

On January 28th in the
Year of our Lord 1942, the Christian Science Monitor printed:

Never
Give a Sucker an Even Break: W.C. Fields acting out a story with results that
are by turns ludicrous, tedious, and distasteful. There is the usual atmosphere of befuddled
alcoholism.

If the chosen people decide that the
Christian Science Monitor is expressing the thoughts of the majority of the
people in the United States, it is possible they would bar me from their
studios and bar my pictures from their theaters, which would force me into the
newspaper business. And if I used your
tactics I might say:

The
Christian Science Monitor: Day in and day out the same old bromides. They no longer look for love and beauty but
see so many sordid things that Mary Baker Eddy did not see in this beautiful
world she discovered after trying her hand at mesmerism, hypnotism, and
spiritualism before landing on the lucrative Christian Science racket.

Why I play in a picture in which I
take a few nips to get a laugh (I have never played a drunkard in my life) I
hope that it might bring to mind the anecdote of Jesus turning water into wine.

And wouldn’t it be terrible if I
quoted some reliable statistics which prove that more people are driven insane
through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol.

Your very truly,

A subscriber,

W.C. Fields

“The
lucrative Christian Science racket” is a sentence for the ages.

In
retrospect, it’s perhaps for the best that I waited 40 years to wade through
Fields’ papers – we never needed him more than we need him now.

W.C.
Fields By Himself can be found on all major used-books sites, such Abebooks.com
and Alibris.com. For the Fields
enthusiast, it is essential reading.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

We have
covered the wonderful work done by People’s
Symphony Concerts in these pages before.
The series was founded in 1900 by conductor Franz Arens. The goal of
People’s Symphony was to bring the best music to students and workers at
affordable prices. In its first year,
more than 7,000 people squeezed into the old hall at Cooper Union to hear
Arens, the son of an immigrant farmer, conduct the first series of People’s Symphony
Concerts. As a music student in Europe,
Arens was too poor to attend many concerts in his youth. When he returned to New York, Arens was determined
to find a way to bring music to students, teachers, workers, and others unable
to pay high ticket prices. Since those
early years, hundreds of thousands of Peoples' Symphony Concerts audience
members have heard the world's foremost concert artists and ensembles at the
lowest admission prices of any major series in the country. During the first season, subscriptions for
the five concerts ranged from $.25 to $1.25 and single tickets went for as
little as $0.10 each.

Current
manager Frank Salomon, ably assisted by David Himmelheber, continue a tradition
of incredible (and increasing) value to New Yorkers who are serious about
music. The duo run the program, which
includes two different series that play Saturday night at Washington Irving High School, near Gramercy Park, and a third series which runs Sunday afternoons in
Manhattan’s Town Hall. The auditorium at Washington Irving has just
been fully renovated, with new seats, refinished floors and an upgrade of the
doors and trims.

Each
year, some of the most prestigious names in classical music participate in
People’s Symphony Concerts. In more than
20 years your correspondent has attended PSC, I have seen such leading lights
as the Guarneri String Quartet, Garrick Ohlsson, the Julliard String Quartet and Richard Stoltzman.

The 2013
season started last Saturday with a wonderful performance by French pianist Lise de la Salle. La Salle, 25, has emerged as one of the most
acclaimed artists of her generation. She
began playing piano at the age of four and gave her first concert at nine in a
live broadcast on Radio-France. At 13,
she made her concerto debut with Beethoven’s
Piano Concerto No. 2 in Avignon and her Paris recital debut at the Louvre
before going on tour with the Orchestre
National d’Ile de France. At 16, she came to international attention with
her Bach/Liszt recording for Naive which was selected by Gramophone as
"Recording of the Month."

De La
Salle has given recitals in Berlin, London and Paris, as well as New York, and has
made concerto appearances in Lisbon, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg and Lyon, and
is equally renowned for her frequent performances in the Far East. She will
soon make her Philadelphia Orchestra
debut and her first appearance at Carnegie Hall as soloist with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

In her
first PSC concert, de la Salle played the Bach/Busoni
Chaconne with perhaps an expertise that was a bit too cold-blooded to be
emotionally moving. The 6 Preludes by Claude Debussy was played with a sure hand, richly conveying the delicate, solitary
notes that resounded throughout the hall.
(Washington Irving has, perhaps, the best acoustics outside of Carnegie
Hall.)

De la
Salle was most masterful in her playing of Robert Schumann’s Variations on the name "Abegg" in F major, and his Fantasie C Major, Op. 17. Her understanding of the rich vein of
romanticism and feeling to be found in Schumann was quite remarkable – I have
seldom heard Schumann done with such empathy and virtuosity.

The pianist
made a fetching impression in her gold and purple evening gown, and her regal
bearing set the right tone for the evening.
All-in-all, it was a wonderful start to what promises to be another
sterling season of People’s Symphony
Concerts.

James Abbott

James Abbott is a California-based writer and arts advocate. His online column The Jade Sphinx (http://thejadesphinx.blogspot.com/) champions the Fine Arts, featuring stories on such concepts as recognizable quality, artistic heritage and tradition, and techniques of the Great Masters.